Deciphering Victorian Underwear, And Other Seminars

Published: February 10, 1991

(Page 3 of 4)

"M.L.A.'s rank and file may murmur but refuse to speak out, through pusillanimity, against the Orwellian thought police who run these meetings," he fumes. "In four days, I have not heard a word of intelligent dissent." He frowns. "Liberalism's belief in meritocracy is being overwhelmed by a variety of florid radicalisms, all of which congregate under the term multiculturalism. People who care about education and freedom must challenge those who declare ideas and writers politically incorrect, and therefore nonexistent. That is intellectual tyranny."

Then there are those like Chauncey A. Ridley, 37, an assistant professor of English and an African-Americanist at California State University at Sacramento, who insist on quality over ideology.

"If you're a poor teacher, or a careless scholar, of course you stress politics, and not the Hispanic, black or Asian literary traditions," Ridley says, as he weaves his way from the "Representing Jazz" session toward a meeting on "Edith Wharton: Issues of Class, Race and Ethnicity." "Any lesser standard opens the way for opponents of multiculturalism. Maybe I'm a bourgeois intellectual, but I don't force-feed ethics or polemic. I teach the great ethnic literatures and their complex sources. Period."

A number of scholars watch the politicizing of literature with enthusiasm, seeing the natural evolution of a field that thrives on novelty and doubt.

"I teach in the Ivy League in order to have direct access to the minds of the children of the ruling classes," says Andrew Ross, unsmiling. "Whoever the politically correct are, it's about time some of them were in the universities."

Like Ross, many younger literary scholars aggressively seek change in the ways texts are read and taught, pressing for race or ethnic studies, feminism, Marxist analysis and textual deconstruction. Literature departments, these critics say, should become far looser entities and not insist on studying by historical period, author or genre.

A few centrist critics continue to define literature as "the best that has been thought or said" or as "the monuments of the European mind, showing who we were and what we might become." They view as a personal and intellectual affront all campaigns to reject Sophocles, Chaucer and Tolstoy as B.D.W.M.'s -- Boring Dead White Males. But in revisionist circles, words like "taste," "hierarchy" and "tradition" bring an impatient roll of the eyes. "Judgmental" is a serious insult; "anti-exclusionist," a compliment.

Watching their elders do battle, many of the professors in training at the M.L.A. appear to suffer from intellectual whiplash (a record one-third of the registrants are graduate students). Richard Abowitz, 23, is a Hollins College graduate student in fiction, filling out applications to Ph.D. programs in English literature for fall 1991. In a battered leather jacket and Dead Milkmen T-shirt, Abowitz blends in nicely at the M.L.A., but although he looks avant-garde, he feels cheated.

"As an apprentice scholar, I've had to read Kate Chopin's 'The Awakening' three times," he says plaintively, "which was fine, but I never learned a thing about Dickens or T. S. Eliot. All I want is access to minds of any race or gender who will teach books like 'Moby-Dick.' Is that too much to ask?"

Well-trained in the new methodologies, Abowitz answers his own question: "Melville is profoundly suspect. There's not a woman in his book, the plot hinges on unkindness to animals and the black characters mostly drown by Chapter 29."

He watches the chattering crowds flow past: "This is my first M.L.A. I guess I expected more civility, less literature in the service of theory. These people eat their own." Abowitz sighs. "Maybe I'll go to law school."

SCHOLARSHIP IS THIRSTY WORK. Daily at 5:15 P.M., M.L.A. attendees pour out of meetings in search of the many cocktail receptions sponsored by allied organizations and specialized societies (political correctness sometimes lessens after hours). An observer may drop in on the Cervantes Society, the William Morris Society, the gay and lesbian literary group, then pause at the Marxist cash bar, liveliest of all.

Here, amid cigar smoke and the clink of Budweiser bottles, attendees sign one another's petitions "to reopen Palestinian universities," bemoan private-school tuitions and trade impressions of the M.L.A.: "My wallet was redistributed, right on Michigan Avenue!" "Half the people here have trust funds." "The bartender is probably C.I.A."

Between talks and parties, M.L.A.-goers prowl the exhibition area, a reader's nirvana of scholarly journals, glossy university-press catalogues and stacks of new books and other publications. Scholars bustle from booth to booth, seeking half-off discounts and free copies from publishers, or stare at computer programs designed to help students avoid plagiarism in their essays.

From lucrative contracts for college textbooks and instructional software to research grants sanctioned by peer-review panels at foundations and Federal endowments, millions of dollars can ride on the profession's instinct for trend.